A closer look

Most business owners have an ideal client profile or target audience, but how do you reach them? If you are marketing, say a high end car, you’re probably not targeting people under 20. But that doesn’t mean the teens who see your ad won’t click. It just means you paid for them to look at a vehicle they (most likely) had no intention of buying. If you have a luxury car budget you probably don’t care, but if your advertising budget is thin, you’d probably prefer that the people who click your ad can actually afford your product.

This is what makes Facebook ads so effective. Facebook’s level of targeting is highly strategic because they capture so much of our data. So if you wanted to target single white men, between the ages of 31-48, who make over 150k, are college educated, play golf and are in the market for a new car, who have shown interest in your brand by liking a product on your fan page, you can show your luxury car ad to just them. That makes your ads less expensive and much more effective.

Now this level of targeting isn’t going to guarantee a sale, but it increases your ROI odds by 49% overall. It also allows you to re-target those who clicked on the ad at a cheaper cost, because the interest in your product shows value to Facebook. Facebook ads rewards you for giving their users products they like or want. So the next time you run another ad to somebody who had shown an interest by interacting with the first ad, it’s a lot cheaper.

Top Social Networks for Marketing

Facebook

93%

Pinterest

20%

Twitter

31%

LinkedIn

23%

So lets talk numbers. One of the recent Facebook ads campaigns we’ve run was for a company that specializes in creating custom clothing for CrossFit gyms. The first thing we wanted to do was utilize a direct response campaign. That means the customer only has one immediate option on the ad’s landing page. That could be: buy the product, sign up for a newsletter, etc. It helps keep the customer’s focus on that one task. If you give people too many options they won’t choose at all.

We ran the ad with a budget of $431.38 and over a one week period we saw the campaign’s ROI up over 400%. During the week we ran this campaign, we generated 299 website clicks (at $0.44/click), 33 immediate, direct leads, an overall reach of 19,243 people within their target audience.

That’s pretty impressive, but why did this campaign perform so well? We didn’t just target our ideal customers and make the decision process easy, we strategically ran the ad a week before a major CrossFit games event and presented it as a way to stand out to other gyms in the area. Utilizing these variables that we identified by knowing our client’s customers well, put us in the best position to capitalize and it did pretty well if we do say so ourselves.

So are Facebook ads a good investment? Yes, they absolutely can be, as long as you’re targeting correctly, the product meets a need, your call to action is simple and there is a sense of urgency.